That means he'll have to face a menu. A restaurant's bill of fare may seem an innocent enough listing of what the kitchen has to offer, but manipulation, even fraud, can lurk among the loving descriptions of free-range chicken and organic arugula.

"I don't want to bad-mouth people, but it happens all the time," says Lev Dagan, who teaches chefs in training how to write menus at the California Culinary Academy.

Whether fast-food or four-star, restaurants offer a morass of menu choices. And the nation is spending more money than ever eating away from home. That ups the odds of getting snookered by a clever menu or served something other than what was ordered. To get the most out of eating out, savvy diners need to understand menu manipulation.

The game can be as subtle as pricing a dish at $9.99 instead of the less- appealing $10. Or it can be more blatant, like highlighting the dish with the highest profit margin or delivering different food than promised.

Sometimes, such swaps can't be helped. The menu might say wild mushrooms, but if the produce market can't deliver, cultivated mushrooms will have to do - - regardless of what's on the menu.

In rare cases, menu fraud is outright deliberate. Last year, the chef at San Jose's Bella Mia was caught substituting pork tenderloin for veal in Italian dishes like veal parmigiana. The practice had been going on for five or six years, much to the chagrin of some Jewish and Muslim customers whose religions prohibit eating pork.

The restaurant agreed to pay $60,000 in fines and restitution after Santa Clara County officials filed a civil action. The chef quit and pleaded guilty to two criminal misdemeanor charges.

Don't be too alarmed. Chefs generally do not go out of their way to mislead the public. Most menus are honest listings of what the kitchen will provide, people in the Bay Area food business say.

Still, it doesn't hurt to be realistic. The fact of the matter is that every menu is, at its heart, a sales tool. And like any other transaction that involves exchanging money for goods and services, diners should stay informed to avoid being ripped off.

HOW IT WORKS

Ever wonder why you wound up ordering that pasta dish when you really had been thinking about a steak? Maybe it's because the pasta was highlighted in large type on the upper-right side of the menu -- the spot smart restaurateurs put dishes they want to sell.

"There are some basic tried-and-true principles in menu design that are always used because they always work," says Charles Polonsky, president of Associates Design, a Chicago-area firm that designs menus for corporate clients like Hyatt as well as for smaller independent restaurant groups.

The average person only spends two minutes reading a menu, which is not a lot of time for a chef to sell what he wants to. The trick, Polonsky says, is to be short and sweet with descriptions, clever with placement and sly with price.

"Don't write the ode to the chicken sandwich," he advises his clients.

And don't make it too easy to choose dinner by the price. "That's too user- friendly," he says. (See the graphic illustration elsewhere on this page.)

The mystery of the menu doesn't end with descriptions and pricing. Say you decide to avoid the pasta dish -- which has a big profit margin -- and order the Niman Ranch New York strip steak. Can you be sure the meat on your plate is a naturally raised piece of beef from the Marin County company?

Not always. Niman Ranch staffers occasionally find themselves in the uncomfortable position of policing restaurants whose menus falsely claim to serve their meat. A sales representative or driver will usually stumble upon a menu making the claim. It doesn't happen a lot, but it did twice at Bay Area restaurants in the last two months.

Usually, the restaurant is a previous customer but the owners change or the buyers stop purchasing Niman Ranch. "They're just pretty embarrassed," says Rob Hurlbut, one of founder Bill Niman's partners. "In many cases, it is a genuine mistake. Maybe the guy doing the menu doesn't know what the buyer has done or an account has been closed."

Sometimes, there are subtler tactics at work. The chef will use Niman Ranch for the hamburger, for example, and say so on the menu. The pricier steaks or chops won't be from Niman, but because Niman Ranch is already on the menu, patrons might assume all the beef at the restaurant is from the company.

"We don't ask them to say, 'This is not Niman Ranch' on the menu, but whether the consumers are aware that it's not, we don't know," Hurlbut says.

And how about that menu that brags about prime beef? Of all the beef graded by the United States Department of Agriculture, only about 2 percent is top-of- the-line prime, and a good portion of that is shipped overseas. So can prime really be on all the menus it shows up on?

Seafood is another area ripe for creative menu writing or, at worst, outright lies.

Consider the large, hand-harvested Maine scallops, often called diver scallops. Chances are, they might not be Maine diver scallops at all. True diver scallops are hard to get. Maine's hand-harvested scallop season is short,

generally from December to April, and bad weather can keep divers in port. In 2000, there were only 390 registered commercial scallop divers in Maine -- surely not enough to supply all the U.S. restaurants that purport to sell them.

Day-boat scallops are different still from diver scallops. They might be from boats that use a dredge or a diver. Either way, day-boats and diver scallops are relatively rare compared to other sorts of domestic sea scallops. It is likely that some of the largest scallops dredged from places like the coast of New Hampshire or even further south are being called divers, Maine fishery experts say.

"Two terms grate against my soul -- diver and day boat. There are so few actual diver-harvested scallops that I cringe when I see them on a menu," says Tim Ports, who owns San Francisco's Fresh Fish Co., a major supplier to fine restaurants in the Bay Area.

"I'm appalled at what I see out there," says Ports, a veteran seafood wholesaler. "I'm seeing (wild) king salmon on menus in a lot of places I know are using (farmed) Atlantic."

As for Chilean sea bass, it's not sea bass at all, but rather Patagonian toothfish.

"People put all sort of things on menus and call it sea bass because it sells. True sea bass is not around that much," says Craig Stoll, chef and co- owner of Delfina in San Francisco and a stickler for knowing exactly where the food he serves comes from.

WHO'S TO BLAME

Don't necessarily blame the chef. She might have been told the scallops were hand harvested, the olive oil was from the first pressing and the greens organic.

"If there's fraud, it can be anywhere, from the person who harvests the product to the person who distributes to the chef," says the CCA's Dagan. "Are there some who take advantage of chefs who don't know what they are doing? Yes. "

The problem is that some chefs don't know their products.

"A lot chefs themselves don't know the difference between a farmed and a king salmon. Put a sauce on a nice piece of fish and it's all salmon to them," says Ports.

So, short of diving in the Dumpster behind the restaurant to look for clues, how can a smart diner avoid being a sucker? Walk into a restaurant armed with a mix of knowledge and trust, chefs say. And consider the following:

-- THE DEVIL'S IN THE DETAILS. Is the menu clean? Are the words spelled correctly? A dirty or torn menu or misspellings can mean a kitchen that doesn't care.

-- COUNT THE DISHES. Can a kitchen possibly execute a hundred or more items well? Also, see if the menu can be changed easily to accommodate changes in market orders and product availability. Look for paper that is inserted into a menu cover or a single card that could be sent through a computer printer. A menu that can be easily changed is more accurate and makes it easier for a chef to respond to changes in product deliveries.

"Some of the menu fraud people might experience is due to the fact that people don't know how to use their laser printer," says Stoll, who writes a new menu daily.

-- BEWARE OF BRAND NAMES. Keep and eye out for names like Jack Daniels, Blue Diamond, M&Ms or even Idaho potatoes on a menu. Some companies and growers' associations write checks to restaurants that use their names on the menu. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does let a customer know the restaurant has a financial as well as a culinary interest in using the product.

Usually, that sort of labeling happens at high-volume restaurants, but it can crop up anywhere.

-- LANGUAGE SPEAKS VOLUMES. Look for out-of-season products, like tomatoes in the winter, and impossible claims.

"People exaggerate more than they defraud," Dagan says. "A menu should read like poetry. It should be easy to read and descriptions should roll off the tongue. And there should be some mystery."

Still, menu descriptions should be clear when it comes to items that commonly spark allergic reactions, like nuts, or if the dish contains an unusual item like tripe or kidneys.

"It's a fine line between telling people what ingredients are in any given dish. You don't want it to sound like a grocery list but you don't want anyone to be unpleasantly surprised," says Ross Browne of Absinthe in San Francisco.

Browne trusts his waiters to flesh out what's on the menu for customers, and he advises customers to use the wait staff to get answers.

Diners should always feel free, he says, to ask such things as where the beef comes from, when the shrimp arrived and who grew the organic salad greens,

for examples.

Yet in the end, customers may never know the whole truth behind restaurant menus. The ultimate tool against menu fraud, experts say, is to choose restaurants you believe won't lie, manipulate or even fudge a little on the menu.

Says Stoll: "At a certain point, you just have to trust."

Anatomy of a menu

Note: Not all restaurants follow this formula. This graphic illustration is based on common sales practices gleaned from professional menu designers and restaurant owners and managers.

Often, items with a high profit margin or the restaurant's signature dishes will be here.

The first and last items always sell the best, so high-profit dishes or ones the restaurant wants to promote go here.

Prices will be staggered or centered under food descriptions so customers can't easily scan for price.

The most expensive items will be buried in the list, often about two-thirds of the way down. .

Siberia

This space is reserved for items that don't make much profit, or for information about gratuity or payment. .

On some types of menus, a photograph can increase the sale of a dish by 40 percent.

This composite menu illustrates some of the tricks of the menu-writing trade.

From Fleur de Lys to
Applebee's
/ Food trends trickle down from chichi spots to chain restaurants Trends in menus come and go, but they always roll downhill.

In three to five years, dishes inspired by the Bay Area's best restaurants will end up on the menus of the nation's largest chain restaurants -- albeit in a form more suited to the masses than the dining elite.

"Everyone is searching for the next Caesar salad," says Nancy Kruse, president of an Atlanta-based marketing research company and trends editor for Restaurant Business magazine. At the magazine's conference in San Diego last month, Kruse and other experts offered their views on menu trends to people from the nation's top chains and independent restaurant groups.

These are not people looking for the perfect microgreen or a stunning verjus. They are interested in changing how the majority of Americans eat by introducing some of the latest food trends. The items they choose end up on fast-food menus, at family-style restaurants like Applebee's and Denny's, theme restaurants like Cheesecake Factory and California Pizza Kitchen, and even higher-end chains like Ruth's Chris Steakhouse and Il Fornaio.

Chains don't want cutting edge; they want volume. And they want a dish simple enough to be made the same way hundreds of times a day by cooks who may not know a lot about cooking.

Here's what may be in store.

-- POLENTA. As part of a move toward regional Italian flavors, restaurateurs are eyeing the versatile corn meal mush as a product that can be adapted into savory dishes or desserts. It may not mean Denny's is going to start selling a Tuscan Slam, but look for it instead of pasta or even potatoes.

-- POTATOES. Some chains are beginning to pair fish with potatoes instead of rice. Also primed for mass market: mashers flavored with garlic or horseradish.

-- DESSERTS. Ubiquitous at high-end restaurants, creme brulee and panna cotta are sliding down the food chain. So are savory touches to desserts, like adding lavender to creme brulee. Also, look for shared dessert samplers.

-- FLAVORED OILS. Chain Account Menu Survey, which studies menus from America's top 200 chains, reports that the number of references to flavored oils like sesame or chile on chain menus doubled in the past year.

-- ROOT VEGETABLES. Creamy mashed turnips or salsify gratin at a place like Gordon's House of Fine Eats in San Francisco may translate to family-style chain restaurants.

-- BISTRO. It's the new catch phrase. The Cheesecake Factory is offering steak frites. Houston's has a braised lamb shank.

Learning the lingo Want to maneuver around a cutting-edge menu like a pro? Learn these terms, which are in vogue on the best menus around the Bay Area. (But be warned, menu language is like
fashion
: Just when you get a grasp on the latest trend, it becomes passe.)

-- -- Brandade. A pounded mixture of fish, usually salt cod, olive oil, garlic and milk or cream. Usually served as a dip.

-- Caramelized. While caramel is a burnt sugar and caramelized can refer to that process of cooking sugar, more often the term caramelized on a menu refers to savory ingredients like onions. In that case, it means the ingredient has been long-cooked, until it turns a deep golden brown and develops a sweetness.

-- Carpaccio. True carpaccio is thin shavings of raw beef filet, with mustard, parsley and capers. The term now refers to any thinly sliced raw ingredient, generally meat or fish.

-- Charcuterie. Meat products, especially made from pork, often including sausages and pates.

-- Confit. A method of preserving meat by cooking it in salt and its own fat. But what it means when it's applied to rhubarb or onions, we're not quite sure.

-- Ragout/ragu. Ragout officially refers to a thick stew, and ragu traditionally means a meat sauce, but in this country you can expect to see them used inter-changeably on menus.

-- Rilletes. Meat that has been slowly cooked in seasoned fat and then pounded into a paste, similar to a pate.

-- Tapenade. A thick paste of olives, capers, olive oil, lemon juice, seasonings and sometimes anchovies, used as a spread or a condiment. The term can also be applied to spreads made in a similar way, such as sun-dried tomato tapenade.

-- Tartare. Originally a dish of coarsely chopped, high-quality raw beef. Now it is applied to raw fish dishes and even some vegetable dishes.

-- Timbale. This usually refers to a dish that has been cooked in a drum- shaped dish called a timbale. A timbale is most often made with custard, rice or forcemeat. .

Social trends have always affected the design and the content of menus. Consider that it wasn't all that long ago that women were given menus without prices. Here's where some recent cultural changes may lead:

ETHNIC CHANGES

-- More Latin American and Mexican flavors and ingredients featured in American-style restaurants -- dressing and dips flavored with jalapeno or chipotle mayonnaise. Mangoes and cilantro will become common flavors.

-- More Asian techniques and dishes, as well as Cuban sandwiches, Thai barbecued skewers and more items flavored with curry.

FAMILIES WITH KIDS

-- More nonalcoholic drinks, including drinks that purport to offer health benefits or that mimic alcoholic drinks, like nonalcoholic frozen margaritas and pina coladas.

-- Healthier items on kid's menus as well as outrageous food like blue applesauce or multicolored macaroni and cheese.

-- More vegetarian items aimed at appealing to teenagers or young adult diners.

AGING BABY BOOMERS

-- Menus that feature larger type

-- Quieter restaurants with brighter lighting

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